Catalyst and REANNZ bring the Cloud to eResearchers

20 February 2017

Catalyst and REANNZ are proud to announce that the Catalyst Cloud is now available to all members of the REANNZ network for their research needs.

New Zealand Universities, Crown Research Institutes and Polytechs can now benefit from REANNZ’s high bandwidth, low latency network when accessing Catalyst Cloud services. The collaboration significantly reduces both provisioning times and costs and enables members to scale their cloud infrastructure on-demand to match their compute requirements.

Announcing the initiative at the 2017 eResearch NZ Conference in Queenstown, both Catalyst and REANNZ welcomed the benefits the partnership will bring to the New Zealand eResearch community.

REANNZ will aggregate the usage of all its members, providing them with easier access to Catalyst’s volume discounts of up to 10%. Data transfer to and from the cloud over the REANNZ network will be zero rated, providing further cost savings.

Catalyst is a New Zealand company with 200+ technologists based in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch. Catalyst can provide guidance and support to researchers on how to migrate or develop their projects on the cloud, enabling them to fully realise its benefits.

“This partnership with Catalyst demonstrates our commitment to creating a rich and interconnected ecosystem of services for NZ’s research and education community. Having specialist, high-performance access to services such as the Catalyst Cloud makes the next generation of research activity possible, paving the way for exciting discoveries across all fields of science and research”, said Nicole Ferguson, chief executive of REANNZ.

“Catalyst is excited to be partnering with REANNZ to support New Zealand’s eResearch community. An open source platform like the Catalyst Cloud can be a fantastic enabler for collaboration, innovation and the advancement of science and technology in this country,” said Don Christie, Catalyst director.

“For example, a recent project with AUT delivered a 10x performance improvement when correlating radio astronomy data on the Catalyst Cloud, compared to their local hardware and network.
This is a great example of what eResearch organisations can achieve when state of the art network and cloud computing is available in their backyard. It is increasingly important to bring compute closer to datasets as these get larger and larger,” Christie said.

REANNZ provides leading edge services for New Zealand’s top researchers and educators, who often need access to technology that cannot be supported by commercial networks.

The Catalyst Cloud is New Zealand’s only fully API-driven cloud infrastructure. It provides customers with access to three geographic regions and 17 web services that are the building blocks of IT. Researchers can service themselves via APIs or a friendly dashboard. This gives researchers the freedom to innovate and bring ideas to life faster than ever.